Abstract

Twenty five years of intense market reforms have not contributed to Russia developing a coherent and effective set of institutions regulating employment relations. The world of work instead has grown into a wilderness of highly differentiated, shadowy arrangements ruled by employers’ arbitrariness (Bizyukov 2011, 2013). By contrast, scholarship contributing to the sociology of work and employment remains underdeveloped, theoretically timid and highly fragmentary. Several reasons have been put forward to explain Russian scholars’ lack of interest in this field. The rejection of the pseudo-scientific Marxism of the Soviet era still casts a long shadow on labour-related research. Post-Socialist transformations have generated such wide-ranging and chaotic change that scholars struggle to collect reliable data and make sense of it. Researchers face new constraints such as unreliable statistics, access restrictions to privatised companies as well as historical limitations in qualitative research design. Furthermore, the post-Soviet scholar is facing challenging questions regarding the status of wage labour. Questions surrounding acceptable levels of unemployment or the fairness of now privately arranged wages or working time have proved controversial for a generation of scholars moving from a perspective where institutions regulating the employment relationship are assumed as centrally planned and universally provided by the state.The monographs selected for this review are the most representative of the state of the art in the field, presenting comprehensive accounts of features and trends in the world of work but also displaying the limitations of prevailing scholarship.